British author and critic David Lodge, best known for his Campus Trilogy of novels, has died aged 89.

Lodge wrote more than two dozen novels and works of nonfiction, as well as television scripts and plays. He was shortlisted for the Booker prize twice, first for his 1984 novel Small World and then in 1988 for the novel Nice Work, which are the second and third instalments of his celebrated Campus Trilogy.

He died peacefully with close family at his side, said his publisher Vintage, an imprint of Penguin Random House.

Lodge’s “contribution to literary culture was immense, both in his criticism and through his masterful and iconic novels, which have already become classics”, said his publisher Liz Foley.

Lodge was born on 28 January 1935 in Dulwich, south London, and grew up in Brockley, which he described as a “a somewhat seedy, neglected bit of London”. He attended Catholic school in Blackheath, where the headteacher encouraged him to go to university.

He graduated with a first from UCL before entering national service for two years. “After about three weeks of basic training … I was quite sure that I wanted to go back to the academic life,” he said. His experience in the army formed the basis of his second novel, Ginger You’re Barmy, published in 1962.

In 1959, aged 24, he married Mary Jacob, whom he had met aged 18. For a year, he worked for the British Council in London, teaching English to foreign students.

In 1960 he published his first novel, The Picturegoers, which he had started writing while in the army. The book is set in and around a cinema in “Brickley”, based on Brockley, and explores Catholicism, which would continue to be a major theme of Lodge’s work.

The same year, he began teaching in the department of English at the University of Birmingham, where he would work until he retired to concentrate on writing in 1987. He became a professor of English literature in 1976.

Birmingham became the model for the fictional Midlands university of Rummidge, where his trilogy of campus novels are set.

The first, Changing Places, was published in 1975. Subtitled “A Tale of Two Campuses”, the novel follows two academics participating in an academic exchange between Rummidge and Euphoric State University, which was based on Berkeley, California.

Changing Places is “the most formally experimental” of the trilogy with parts of it written as play text and one section composed of newspaper clippings, wrote Natasha Tripney in the Guardian in 2011. “But all three share a postmodern playfulness, a generous dusting of literary reference.”

His other novels include The British Museum Is Falling Down, Out of the Shelter, How Far Can You Go?, Paradise News and Therapy.

At Birmingham, Lodge met the English author Malcolm Bradbury. Upon Bradbury’s death, Lodge wrote in the Guardian that Bradbury was his “oldest and closest friend in the literary world” and that he had encouraged Lodge “to work the vein of comedy that was his own forte”.

In 1963, Lodge and Bradbury collaborated with undergraduate student Jim Duckett on a revue for the Birmingham Repertory theatre. “I have happy memories of hilarious script-writing sessions, with Jim and me pacing up and down, while Malcolm pounded out and improved our lines on an upright typewriter,” wrote Lodge. “I’m not sure that writing was ever such fun again.”

Lodge’s critical works include The Art of Fiction, Consciousness and the Novel and The Practice of Writing. He also wrote a trilogy of memoirs: Quite a Good Time to Be Born, Writer’s Luck and Varying Degrees of Success, published between 2015 and 2020.

Lodge was appointed a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1997 and a Commander of the Order of the British Empire in 1998. In 1976, he was elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Literature.

Small World and Nice Work were adapted for TV; while the script for Small World was written by Howard Schuman, Lodge himself wrote the screenplay for Nice Work.

In 1994, Lodge adapted Dickens’ 1844 novel Martin Chuzzlewit for a BBC series. He wrote three plays: Home Truths, Secret Thoughts and The Writing Game, which was also adapted for television.

Lodge “was a true gentleman”, said his literary agent Jonny Geller. “Warm, generous and kind, and a lunch with David would involve laughter and serious conversation about contemporary writing. His social commentary, meditations on mortality and laugh-out-loud observations make him a worthy addition to the pantheon of great English comic writers that links him to Wodehouse, Waugh, Amis and others.”